On June 17, 2015, a white, twenty-one-year-old redneck took a Glock handgun to a Bible study at a historic black church in Charleston, North Carolina, and opened fire, massacring nine people. As is customary in the public spectacle that follows these all-too-frequent moments of bloodletting in American life, creepy photos of the gunman were dug up and quickly disseminated over social media. In some of Dylann Roof’s selfies, he was flanked by the Confederate flag. Having grown up in the Mississippi Delta, I found these images especially disgusting. I thought, It’s fucking 2015… why in the hell is this allowed or tolerated? After a centuries-long struggle for social justice, that flag’s continued presence in the cultural regalia of the South represented an untenable sanctioning of racism, civil war, human rights abuses, and violence. Now, in the wake of a mass shooting by a killer who later explained that he was trying to ignite a race war, here was a vile reminder of why that flag had no place in modern America.
Then, something remarkable happened. People’s outrage found a clear and concise expression. It took the form of a three-word imperative prefixed with a hashtag that was widely shared across Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook: #TakeItDown. Within days, Walmart, Amazon, Sears, and eBay had announced they’d stop selling Confederate paraphernalia; the governors of Alabama and South Carolina had called for the removal of the flag from their statehouses; and those of Virginia and North Carolina had stopped issuing license plates bearing the symbol. The cable network TV Land even halted reruns of The Dukes of Hazzard, the early-eighties sitcom whose lead characters’ signature asset was the “General Lee,” a 1969 Dodge Charger with the Confederate flag painted on its roof.
Why suddenly had the zeitgeist changed? For decades I’d watched my father, Bill Luckett, a Mississippi lawyer and politician, along with his friend and business partner, the actor Morgan Freeman, publicly battle the “stars and bars.” He’d been able to remove it from our local town house, only after he became the mayor of Clarksdale, Mississippi, the mostly black town in which he lives, but the rest of the state—and much of the old South—just dug in and resisted. Now, 150 years after the Civil War, it was coming down everywhere—almost overnight.
What drove this about-face reaction? Why suddenly did we collectively start equating this symbol with hate and stop supporting it? Two words: social media. After little more than a decade in existence, this dynamic new mass communication system holds a commanding grip on twenty-first-century society. It has forever changed how we share and use information, organize communities and businesses, make political decisions, forge bonds, and maintain relationships with each other. Social media has sent into overdrive the random, evolutionary algorithm that dictates how ideas are generated, iterated, and reconceived, and how our culture takes shape. It is completely reshaping the essence of what it means to be human.
The social media developments around the Charleston massacre offer a snapshot of how this evolutionary process plays out within the new communications architecture that social media has forged. #TakeItDown was born of a mutation of #BlackLivesMatter, the hashtag of the movement spawned by incidents of police brutality against black citizens and the street protests that followed. When, amid the outrage that followed the Charleston shooting, #BlackLivesMatter activist Bree Newsome climbed the South Carolina statehouse’s flagpole to take down the Confederate flag, tweets that shared one of many smartphone-shot videos of her act soon carried a new hashtag: #JeSuisBree, a variation on #JeSuisCharlie, the statement of solidarity that was adopted en masse after twelve journalists were murdered by Islamic extremists in Paris months earlier—a meme that later simply became #JeSuisParis following the still deadlier terrorist attacks of November 13, 2015.
Other meme cross-pollinations followed: As Newsome became a social media hero, she was depicted in artworks as Wonder Woman. When the Supreme Court struck down laws barring gay marriage a few days later—itself a response to social media–driven legal activism—artists leaped at the chance to mesh two highly recognized symbols into a single compelling idea. Cartoons depicted the gay rights rainbow flag being raised while the Confederate flag was lowered, and a modified Dukes of Hazzard poster showed the General Lee sporting a rainbow roof.
This is how ideas spread and value systems evolve in the age of social media. They morph through hashtags, photos, and shared cartoons and videos. They rely on emotional triggers to open up lines of communication. What seem like nuggets of information can amass immense power. The ones that stick arouse emotions—joy, sadness, anger—and spur people into a reaction. In this new information architecture, the most compelling and emotive ideas can transform public opinion in mere days and weeks, generating abrupt changes in attitudes and priorities that had previously lasted for decades. For better or worse, social media is making human culture less rigid, more dynamic and unpredictable, and subject to much faster evolution.
People’s opinions about social media are often strong and widely divergent. To many, these networks are empowering tools of liberation. In his memoir, Twitter cofounder Biz Stone reflected on the service’s usefulness for organizers of the Arab Spring uprisings, writing, “We hadn’t changed the world, but we’d done something even more profound and had learned a deeply inspiring lesson: When you hand good people possibility, they do great things.” In those heady days, this positive view of Twitter was widely shared. But, as I write this today, a news story about social media is just as likely to invoke fears about cyberbullying, time wasted on celebrity gossip, and how these platforms have become a tool for ISIS and other hate-mongers. No matter which of these perspectives dominates your view, you cannot deny the profound impact that social media has had on society. This undulating and amorphous new communication architecture has become the digital economy’s central mechanism for how policies, organizations, and innovations are created and shaped.
And yet, as ubiquitous as social media has become, most of us have little notion how it works. It seems utterly bewildering. We simply do not comprehend its form, function, and possibilities. How is that one witty Facebook post can rapidly attract a million views while another that seems just as funny goes nowhere? Why do some political polemics manage to generate an overwhelming wave of mass hysteria literally overnight and then disappear off people’s radar a few days later? Social media can feel like a giant ocean of unpredictable swells, tidal shifts, and hurricanes that surge out of nowhere. It is time we figure out how this mass complexity actually functions. That’s my goal in writing this book.
Nearly all of us now have a digital persona, not just celebrities and influencers but marketing managers, politicians, business leaders, writers, athletes, and high school students. That makes us integral elements of this unique human network. We must come to terms with and figure out what we want from it. If we are to learn how to democratize it, how to deliver constructive communications that build a better world, and how to live at peace with the relentless barrage of information, we must understand what makes this system tick.
Our choices in what we do, who we have sex with, and what we buy are made through these peer-to-peer systems. In the new economic contexts of our age—the so-called sharing economy, for example, or the “gig economy”—where not only established businessmen but also ordinary people are constantly “selling” themselves, those who don’t adjust to this new communications architecture will be left behind. At the corporate level, too, marketing managers will waste oodles of money if they continue to rely on systems and consultants who fail to recognize the fundamentally different social dynamics of this new system and simply recast old media tactics as if they are new social media strategies. These self-described social media “gurus,” with their litany of buzzword-laden nonsense, are condemning once powerful, trusted brands to a future of relentlessly declining relevance and revenues. And finally, society as a whole will suffer if we can’t collectively figure out how to harness this new model of communications for good. We can’t simply leave it to the loudest, most non-inclusive bullies. (One word: Trump.) We must start by acknowledging that this sprawling, powerful new system for spreading ideas is now the system for everything and that it is categorically different from the previous one. Once we establish that, we can start to take a closer look at how it actually works. Only then can we design strategies that turn social media into a constructive, democratic forum for proposing, debating, and delivering new policy ideas.
We desperately need a guide, an overarching theory of social media. Coming up with such a theory is a tall ask; after all, we’re talking about the functioning of something as complex as our global society. But, being the kind of audacious zealot that I am, I believe I’ve come up with one. And as my Aussie co-author might say, “It’s a ripper.”
My hero and mentor Norman Lear, the great TV producer and social activist, always told me to follow the serendipity of life. He meant that I should appreciate and learn from every twist and turn of experience that comes my way. He also liked to say that the fastest route between two people or places was the direct one. Armed with that message, I’ve had the confidence to network from field to field and to engage in opportunities that connected and presented themselves. As such, my career has been shaped by a mélange of microbiology research, systems engineering, art collection, talent management, music and film production, and, most recently, as an innovator at the largest media company in the world and a pioneer of social media publishing. The Los Angeles Times once wrote that I had “mastered the art of excess.” Whether it’s what the writer meant or not, I like to think it referred to my genuine curiosity about the world, how it works, and how everything is interconnected. I want to know as much about the nuclei of tiny cells as about the behavior of human communicators and the vast social and economic networks that arise from their connections with each other. In pursuing those eclectic interests, I’ve somewhat serendipitously stumbled upon my own “theory of everything,” an explanation for how the universe’s infinitely diverse components combine to forge order and meaning out of chaos, defining this wondrous experience we call life.
My theory provides a chart of existence showing how biology, technology, and culture are, quite literally, evolving together. That process has now reached a convergence point, and social media—a technological platform that facilitates organic connections through which human beings share art, words, and ideas—is its manifest expression. With this biology-framed perspective, we can also recognize that the structure and internal workings of this new system are defined by the laws of the natural world, by the biological and ecological roots from which we all come. Stated more simply, social media functions on every level like a living organism.
You want to understand social media? Or, more precisely, how human society functions in the digital age?
You need to review the essence of life itself.
It took an epiphany in the desert for me to discover that.